Cost-cutting has become one of the top issues across all industries, particularly data management. Some companies work on trimming employee rosters, hours, salaries, and bonuses, while others try to cut corners on IT and equipment infrastructure spending. But even bigger advantages may be gained by pursuing more efficient data management solutions.
Focus On Needed Services
The IT industry is flexible in the sense that providers tend to offer a wide menu of bundled services and costs designed to fit various budgets. Some services require up-front fees, while others may be based on continuous subscription fees. Cloud storage has become very attractive to businesses of all sizes because it has opened the door to enormous savings.
What companies need to avoid is the temptation to go along with whatever one-size-fits-all package is presented to them by marketers. Some firms may not need every service that comes with a bundled package, so they end up losing value on IT costs. It’s best for decision-makers to negotiate with the most flexible IT providers that can accommodate their specific business needs.
Efficient Data Storage
Every company likely needs to store inactive as well as active data. Inactive data, which may only be needed once or twice per year, can be moved out of a high-cost Tier 1 facility and stored in a more affordable yet secure place. The 2016 Genomics Report issued by Veritas found that due to big data exponentially expanding, a clutter crisis is being created across network environments. The cost of this clutter is the real problem, especially for big files such as videos that can add up to enormous space.
Personnel in charge of data management can help solve this issue by deciding at the archive stage the most cost-efficient place to store the data. It all depends on how much the data will need to be regularly accessed. That’s why it’s important to question providers about how much of the space they promote will be for formatting, which can significantly reduce storage space.
Data reduction and compression are other options that can save terabytes of space. Not only do these options increase capacity, but they can also improve performance at sometimes no additional fees.
Maximizing Service Plan Options
Service plans are designed to be the icing on a cake for long-term deals, and often run on three-year cycles then are renewed, sometimes at higher rates. But these plans are commonly based on unwarranted claims, as the vendor is merely trying to sweeten the deal for self-serving purposes, and are similar to the unnecessary “extended warranties” pitched by car dealerships.
The alternative to settling for whatever the provider pitches are to negotiate or resist the service plan by considering these three options:
- Continue paying extra money for potentially nothing in return
- Switch to a different service plan with the same or different vendor
- Avoid IT support, which is a high risk
Luckily, the most credible IT providers are flexible enough to negotiate, since their goal is to retain long-term clients. Working with partners that already offer adequate security and support without the three-year service plan is usually the most efficient and practical option. Costs may be cut further if the IT firm provides data management tools for customers to handle on their own.
Conclusion
Data management is an often overlooked area where cost-efficiency can be achieved. Storing data that is not essential for immediate use can run up costs on high-end servers. It’s more advantageous to prioritize which active files live on primary servers while storing less-used data through more affordable solutions.